by Lewis, D. F.
*
“The fish smelled!”
Arthur smiled as he replaced another divot above the body that he and his younger sister Amy had just buried during a solemn ceremony of childish reveration... marking a departure from life by one of Amy’s loved pets.
“He didn’t!” Amy dabbed at her eyes.
At that moment, a low-flying helicopter—vanes clacking fast—banked over the apartment towers, criss-crossed as in a display of aviation above the allotments and finally churned quickly into the distance. If children were able to feel their own paranoia for what it was, then Arthur sensed that his worst enemy was the pilot of that chopper spying on him... and, with the sensitivities that only children can feel but not understand, he somehow knew that the pilot was himself (Arthur) from a future he was yet to inhabit.
He turned to Amy, deciding to ignore his dark instincts with regard to the diminishing pinprick of the helicopter now being lost to the suburban horizon. While both their sibling feelings towards each other were typically abrasive he did, at heart, worry about her and, before being able to stop himself, he proceeded to quench Amy’s tears regarding her recently deceased goldfish.
“You’ve still got a canary in a cage. And that fish really smelled!”
“It only smelled after it died.” Her sobs worsened to the extent of giving her words an even higher pitch than normal.
When they had found her dear fish floating at the top of the bowl bloated like a human ear, the room was so filled with fumes, Amy’s canary showed signs of soon choking to death itself had not the fish-bowl been removed forthwith to the outhouse. And, if not death, certainly some state between life and death which could not easily be defined.
Arthur stared at Amy, his immediate impulse caught between hugging her and scolding her for being so sentimental, but the words he used to convey this thought to his brain were much simpler than words such as ‘scold’ or ‘sentimental’. He recalled their mother’s story of dream sickness and wondered if it would be any use in comforting Amy by reminding her of it in words she could understand. Arthur himself had failed to understand their mother’s version of it, but deep within yet another instinct similar to the earlier one regarding the helicopter, he understood the story quite well as he replayed it in his mind.
Once upon a time—their mother had begun by telling them—there was a country where people could not judge between the state of dreaming and that of experiencing real things while awake. A girl called Sudra lived in that country. Not a country of the blind, but a country of dream uncertainty. Sudra loved the new shoes that she had been given for Christmas. But how could she be sure they were new enough? Or even shoes at all in such a world? She decided to visit the wisest man in the country who happened to live in the same village as Sudra and her family. This man told her the shoes were not only new, but also real. She was relieved—at first. Until she worried if the wisest man in the country was a dream himself. Why would the wisest man in the country happen to live in the same village as Sudra? But he had to live somewhere. He had even claimed he was the wisest man in the whole world, not just the wisest man in this particular country. Did this claim not prove he was lying, and, if lying, did not the probability of this being a dream increase considerably? Or lessen? Sudra didn’t know where to turn. The shoes were strange shoes since at the front and back of each one were little bells. And they were yellow shoes. Her parents said this would help them find her, should she get lost. But Sudra had never seen shoes like them before in the country where she lived. They must have been specially made. And the family was so poor how could they have afforded such bespoke shoes? She decided to test out the reality of her current thoughts by unthinking them. People got over deaths by unthinking them. They got over grief and pain simply by unthinking them. Yet she still smelled the countryside that surrounded the house, she still smelled all the common and customary smells of the house itself... and even with her eyes closed as she concentrated on unthinking all her doubts, the smell of the smells continued to smell around her. And when the parents entered the room to find her, she had vanished! Only the shoes remained, sitting silently on the yellow carpet. But Sudra’s smell remained for her parents to follow.
A sad or inscrutable ending—their mother had explained—but one that had many possible meanings.
Indeed it did, thought Arthur, as he more simply retold the tale to Amy. And as Amy wiped the tears away, she even smiled. Now the whole world would be her fish. Just one of the tale’s many morals.
They laughed as many other morals of their mother’s fable took root.
Meanwhile, a huge spinning wheel appeared over the suburban skyline, constructed of many shining metal stanchions and cylinders, its central top cockpit filled with the biggest head of an unknown creature the children had ever seen. Soon, however, at a vast slant in the sky, it dipped towards the ground where its spinning edges began to delve: throwing up great cascades of earth like fountains of detritus towards the clouds that soon became gritty themselves. This Unidentified Flying Object soon vanished below the ground towards further skies it hoped existed inside the Earth—or it had simply grounded itself like a pitifully sick whale beaching upon the bank of a river.
“If the fish smelled anything,” said Arthur, “it certainly can still smell you, Amy.”
And he took her hand to go inside.
“Wait!” shouted Amy. And she picked up her favourite flowerpot nearby, in which sat her favourite doll, and she took this with her as she followed a now freshly unthinking, unthoughtful Arthur overland towards their home.
*
Scene: In Paternoster Square: just outside Earth Towers Hall, Klaxon City.
“There was no scene-setting,” said Crazy Lope, “only the bare stage.”
“Did anyone introduce Sudra?” asked Edith with the parasol. Indeed, she bobbed it up and down with the rhythm of her words.
“She did her best. Nobody knew what to expect.” Lope was fascinated by the lady’s parasol, if not hypnotised.
“What did Sudra say?” asked the matronly lady, still in tune with the parasol.
“Sudra, Sudra, Sudra, Sudra, why keep saying her name? There’s only one person we can talk about at a time.”
“Well, what was said?”
“Verbatim? You want it verbatim?”
“As far as possible.”
The parasol remained dead still, despite a breeze, as Lope did his best to repeat, for Edith’s benefit, the exact words which Sudra used during her speech from the bare stage:
“‘Speech needs nothing but the words and nothing outside of what was actually said. The explanation of my theory, therefore, will, today, be uninterrupted by scene-setting or, even, questions. I shall simply launch into it, as I have already done with the words about speech above, and then launch out of it before you have the chance to know what has happened. Indeed, a being’s most significant sign of humanity is speech. Once upon a time, speech developed slowly but, at least, it did develop and only in rare cases did it remain in the realm of animal grunts. But, now, children are becoming less and less innocent with the onset of an increasingly modern civilisation. Their eyes become cowed with experience, as if they can foresee the sex in which they’ll be forced to partake, by gratuitous choice or by love or by lust or by rape... or by a combination of any of these. Speech is part of this process, that and self-awareness, body-awareness, gender-awareness, genital-awareness... even before puberty. No wonder a sparkling infant soon becomes dowdy and bleary-eyed... with sorrow and sadness underlying the veneer of its happy-go-lucky speech. Another factor, too, is madness. You may feel the impossibility of self-madness. You may look at drunks or lunatics or any of the fringe people in the street mouthing obscenities or simply shouting nonsensical noises or grunting like animals. Indeed, as a side issue, have you noticed how even ordinary, clean-living folk are now more prone to mouthing uncouth words? Anyway, you may be confident in your own sanity but, then, completely unpremeditated, you find yourse
lf shouting out... angry, say, at how the waitress is late with your order or, simply, the stress of an increasingly modern world finally takes its toll on you... and that is merely the beginning of uncontrollable madness taking you over as the language of speech once slowly took you over when you were an infant…’”
Lope paused from quoting Sudra, with tears in his eyes.
“Is that all that was spoken by Sudra?” asked the dowager, wondering why she, Edith, was still holding up the parasol when the sun had long since vanished behind the clouds.
“I may not have quoted exactly.”
“Yes, but was there any more?”
“I don’t know. I had to leave the theatre in a hurry to meet you here.”
“I wouldn’t have minded if you stayed to hear the end.”
“Well, I felt too sad to listen to more. I recognised myself in that bit about madness. And in that bit about children growing up too quickly.”
“We all grow old too quick. There’s nothing new in that.”
“And we all grow confused and unsure of our bearings.”
“And of who is speaking...”
“…to whom?”
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe God meant it to happen this way.”
At this moment, crowds began to pour silently from the Hall’s entrance at the other side of the square. Many of them raised umbrellas over their heads as it was now raining. And many did not. Sudra, uniquely coloured, was among them pushing a doll—in a toy pram or wheeled flowerpot depending on the distance with which one was viewing it. A zoom lens would have revealed a stub of a pencil stuck in one of the doll’s eyes, perhaps evidence of an earlier tantrum—also that Sudra was bare-footed. At least, one hopes that Sudra had reached the outside, because a giant complex UFO accidentally clipped a pylon and finally collided with the Hall where she had been speaking... followed by a roar of splintering off-detritus more suitable for a strapped-bomb christened Sunnemo finally imploding.
*
The waitresses were generously supplied, almost one for each table.
The tea-room was very swish, plenty of smooth freshly laundered white linen, silver napkin rings embossed with antlered deer and pentinent youths, sturdy chunky heavy-duty yet good quality cutlery... and large bowls of fresh flowers pricked out in bright colours and still drenched in dew.
He ordered a tier of cakes, licking his lips at the thought of the custard slices, cream cones, coconut pyramids, battenburgs topped with whipped almond, spicy bread-and-butter pudding baked to a rich brown crust, waffles dripping in wild honey...
The particular waitress attending to his needs was no older than his own daughter, the prettiest of the whole bunch, he thought. She wore a uniform which, rather than hiding her figure, accentuated its more sensuous angles, as if an artist had finished off an otherwise boring portrait with the subtle pastel striptease of water-colour.
The skirt-length was below her knees, but the slender calves and dimpled ankles were all the more enticing for that. The stockings were of such low denier, they took nothing from the flesh.
The tea infused him, like a heady drug. The blends reached to the back of his throat, even before he lifted the bone china to his lips. And he stared dreamily across the tea-room, as the waitress turned her back to fetch from the display counter further cakes he had ordered. Her rear proportions were slight enough to retain the integrity of the skirt-length, but womanly enough to produce folds, pleats, flairs and a long sculptured quarter-moon down each side... that made him want to touch, if only fleetingly.
The other waitresses were nothing in comparison: mere bodies holding up their uniforms like clothes-horses for airing. One even had a face that reminded him of his nightmares... and she had the temerity to scold his own waitress for picking up the cakes with her fingers rather than with the tongs.
He half rose from his chair, as if to remonstrate: he could not wish for anything better than to have the comestibles handled by his waitress, to produce a new flavour, whether imaginary or not, that would backwash the roof of his mouth with the froth of love...
He thought better of it. The tongs would have to do. The winsome one returned with the second tier of cakes, smiling fit to take sunshine into the dreariest late afternoon.
Her skirt-length lightly brushed his arm, inadvertently, and he bit his tongue painfully to stop himself from...
She had gone far too quick. Evidently the end of her duty, disappearing into the kitchen, with not even a backward glance for her erstwhile loyal loving customer.
His teeth entered an angel cake, leaving daubs of red where his injured tongue had probed its texture...
He cursed and left the tea-room, paying the nightmare waitress; she worked the old-fashioned cash register as if she were issuing tickets for a dubious show in that other part of London he sometimes frequented. Being in so much of a hurry, he even forget to retrieve the large gratuity he had left under the bone china saucer: it had been intended of course for the waitress with the sunny smile who, like him, had taken such a sudden departure into the gloom of dusk. Perhaps intent on catching a train before it left. Air-raid sirens permitting.
*
The view through the cockpit window—as the vast Circular-Saw penetrated the cavity-walls of Inner Earth—was not so much a panorama of the reality beyond the window but of a moment of strobe-history that the pilot who peered through the window was undergoing as he instinctively tussled with the controls.
His dream of strobe-history showed twin Earths that were on a collision course—through the wide vista of his vision. Instead of creating a huge explosion, they blended or merged in the same way that, once upon a time, the legendary man-city, having begun to bury itself beyond its own foundations, eventually encountered another city with initial splintering ricochets of architecture and hard core but then blended with it—thus making two places the same place but different.
The pilot of the Saw quickly regathered his present moment uncorrupted by any dream of strobe-history just in time to address the situation of a Drill making towards him.
*
My custom was to explore secondhand bookshops at the slightest opportunity. It needed guile to shake off Beth and the children—but, one day in Whofage, I had a rare success in subterfuge. We were about to traipse around a toy museum and, without giving them a chance to reply, I told them that I would be back in half an hour to conduct them onwards to the various amusements in the ‘Klaxon City’ amusement arcade that needed coins in the slots.
I had indeed spotted a wondrous curiosity shop on the approach to the toy museum, hidden to the view of my wife and children (and of most other visitors, too). But my expert tunnel vision having picked it out down a Sunnemo-less alley, I was convinced by my instinct that it would purvey a veritable trove of dusty books. And I was not mistaken. However, it proved not very different from what I imagined the toy museum to be, since in every corner there seemed to reside many ancient jacks-in-the-box, china dolls, jingle-jangly shoes, pop-up nursery rhyme books and colourful whips and spinning-tops—but here they were for sale rather than show. If I had known, I could have killed two birds with one stone by bringing my family here.
The books themselves were a dream. First editions galore with lightly pencilled prices on the fly-leaves, some even within the range of my purse. Others, of course, not. Many were Victorian, but mostly hardbacks (with original dust-wrappers) from the twenties, thirties and forties, children’s dreams and adults’ fancies.
I was surprised to discover an old stamp album: full of colourful squares, oblongs and triangles (and even one large colourful trapezium of a stamp from Agraska), carefully affixed with sticky paper hinges. I imagined a child (now grown into an adult more long in the tooth even than myself) meticulously wielding tweezers, positioning his prize specimens at the optimum angle and sitting back sighing with pride. This boy would have eschewed even birdsong or playtime in the sunshine for such a close-ordered activity.
My surpr
ise was generated by the fact that such an article was stacked with the secondhand books, bulging as it was with well-hung stamps. Some of the stamps looked “rare”, but many must have been gathered together from a lucky-dip selection which children used to obtain by sending off a coupon from the Tiger or Lion or Eagle comics. The stamps used to come “on approval”. But there were some examples of stamps in this album that I had not been able to even dream about when I was that age.
I covetted that album more than anything I could recall covetting before. I held a whole childhood between my fingers. But there was no price pencilled, presumably because the fly-leaf was covered with a highly stylised map of the surface world. So, that was where Saar was. And Andorra, San Marino, British Honduras, Monaco and St Helena. Nobody ever seemed surprised that most of these small places had outlandishly large postage stamps. I looked round for the shop counter, fully expecting a wizened old man to be stationed behind it—one with pipe, toothbrush moustache and eyes bleary from poring over small print. But this was a day full of surprises—since a girl of surpassing beauty smiled at me from behind the counter, appearing as cool as her flowingly diaphonous dress of white…
I collected my family who were impatiently kicking their heels outside the museum. Apparently, it was a natural history exhibition. Why I had originally thought it was a toy museum, I could not now fathom. What was abundantly clear, my wife and children had been bored and decidedly crotchety at my lengthy absence from their party. I blamed it on having been cut short and the nearest convenience a fair step away. And it had not been a particular pleasure, I assured them, standing next to all those sweaty individuals and the many ‘nervous little people’ who followed us around in Whofage. But my family soon oozed forgiveness when I changed my remaining ten bob note for 120 pennies at the ‘Klaxon City’ arcade. The old wizened fellow who sat behind the towers of copper quarter p coins in the change booth actually winked at me. He looked decidedly unhinged.